The present invention relates to medical devices that may monitor and manage patients and patient treatment, and in particular to such medical equipment having the capacity to provide patient-specific advisory information.
Medical devices, for example, including heart monitors, blood oxygen sensors, infusion pumps, and the like play an important role in providing real-time health support of patients in the hospital and clinical environment. Such equipment may operate automatically to monitor vital signs of the patient and to administer drugs and the like. Normally, a healthcare professional such as a nurse, following the advice of a physician, may input settings to a microprocessor or the like associated with such equipment defining the operation of the equipment. The nurse may then be free to attend to other duties, requiring only periodic monitoring of the equipment.
Such medical devices may provide certain alarm signals indicating problems that may relate to the patient or to the interaction between the patient and the machine including certain machine fault conditions. These alerts are based on rules internally programmed into the medical devices related to the particular function of the machine. For example, an infusion pump may report an occlusion in the IV line indicated by a pressure rise.
In addition, it is known to program drug delivery systems such as infusion systems, with facts about the drugs they deliver, for example, parameter limits for intravenous infusion for particular drugs. When such infusion systems are properly notified of the drug being delivered, they may provide for a check of their own delivery settings against those parameter limits providing alert if there is a conflict between the two.
With increasing availability of data sources for drug facts, disease treatment protocols, clinical therapy protocols, etc, together with advancements in developing “smart” medical devices with wireless communication and advisory features, better systems and methods of use can be developed to utilize available knowledge base for a specific patient with specific conditions. The advisory can be provided by a medical device(s) or other related devices. The advisory can be made on a remote site, or on site. The timing can be real time, in advance, or post-treatment. Such system(s) and method(s) are provided in this patent application.